Caemeron Crain
The following recap contains spoilers for Silo S1E9, “The Getaway” (written by Lekethia Dalcoe and directed by Adam Bernstein)
Silo S1E9, “The Getaway,” picks up almost exactly where the story left off last week. The episode hits the ground running, and so does Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson). Her ability to elude the authorities throughout the course of what follows continues to strain plausibility or suggests some real incompetence on the part of those authorities.
This week, Juliette hides from Sims (Common) in his own apartment, taking his wife and child hostage so that she can use his computer. This is particularly funny because Sims sent some raiders to escort the pair home, but his wife wouldn’t let them check the apartment. Bernard (Tim Robbins) gives Sims a hard time about sending those raiders, as he thinks it may show that Sims cares more about his family than the silo, and he does not seem to revise that view when he finds out that Juliette was hiding in that apartment all along.
I’m also a little confused about the hidden cameras. We’ve seen Juliette destroy several of these at this point, but it doesn’t quite seem that the surveillance team knows that a room that was under surveillance no longer is. Unless I’m missing something, they just seem to be very incompetent. Bernard is justifiably irritated by that incompetence, but if he’s been the head of IT and is in charge of all of these people, it’s kind of his fault in a deeper and more sustained way than it is theirs.
Regardless, Bernard does manage to get the information from Lukas (Avi Nash) that the hard drive Juliette showed him had the number 18 on it, which he says is the serial number despite its brevity. The implication here would be that this is a very old hard drive, which perhaps we knew, but if the implication is that it is the 18th hard drive ever used within the silo, that’s a lot older than I thought.
I’m still playing with the idea that maybe the silo is a lot younger than everyone thinks—maybe how long humanity has been inside is part of the lie—but the deeper mystery remains about the footage of Jane Carmody’s cleaning that we see again in S1E9, as Juliette, Danny (Will Merrick) and Patrick Kennedy (Rick Gomez) see it for the first time.
We know that the window in the cafeteria is lying. We’ve known that since at least Episode 2. What we still don’t know is whether the direct inference that Allison (Rashida Jones) drew, that it is actually safe to go outside, holds up. The possibility that it is toxic out there, even though it looks like it isn’t, lingers.
In the video he’s recorded for her, George (Ferdinand Kingsley) tells Juliette that he found a giant metal door, but he couldn’t get through it. He also tells her not to worry about the water, and I can’t help but remind you that Juliette’s fear of the water kept her from exploring further, and that this was also at the end of Episode 2. So we’ve basically spent the whole season getting back to where we started.
That this was going to be the structure of the season has been clear for a while, and I’m glad that we at least got to this point by the end of S1E9 instead of the end of the season finale itself.
Others have surely enjoyed the ride more than I have, but the amount of information we’ve learned over the past seven episodes has been rather minimal, and the character work has been a bit lacking. I have come to care about Paul Billings (Chinaza Uche), and the existence of “the syndrome” is an intriguing wrinkle to the overall story, but we still don’t know much of anything about this condition beyond the fact that Paul has to hide it, lest he not be allowed to do any physical work.
He finds the Georgia guidebook behind Juliette’s bathroom mirror and decides to burn it in the oven for some reason. Maybe that’s just to destroy it, but I’m not entirely sure I get why he feels compelled to do that as opposed to putting it back where he found it or turning it over to the higher-ups. But he takes a page for himself, which I hope is significant to some degree beyond him proceeding to get caught with it. I hope he took it for reasons other than sentimentality. And I hope he doesn’t die next week now that I’ve decided I like him.
I expect that Juliette will go and find George’s door. Since he said he couldn’t find a way to open it, I expect some time to be spent on this as a puzzle, but I hope that doesn’t take up the whole episode. I guess we’ll find out.
See you next week for the season finale.
